Prince Lestat (68 page)

But what loomed ahead of him now were challenges more wondrous
and splendid than he’d ever foreseen. And he wanted this, this future, this time in which “Hell would have no dominion” and in which the Devil’s Road had become the Road of the People of Darkness, who were essentially children no more.

This was beyond happiness and beyond contentment. This was nothing other than peace.

From the depths of the townhouse came the music of Antoine and Sybelle with a new melody, a furious Tchaikovsky waltz, ah, the waltz of “The Sleeping Beauty,” and on and on the music surged in Antoine’s magnificent glissandos, and Sybelle’s pounding chords.

Oh, how differently he heard this triumphal music now than he had once heard it, and how he opened himself to it, acknowledging its magnificent claims.

He closed his eyes. Was he making lyrics for this swirling melody, was he forming some affirmation for his soul? “Yes, and I do want this, yes, I do take it, yes, I hold it in my heart, the will to know this beauty forever, the will to let it be the light on my path.…”

On they went, faster and faster, the piano and the violin singing of gaiety and glory as if they had always been one.

A random noise pierced his thoughts. Something wrong. Be
en garde
. The music had stopped.

Over the top of the brick wall to his left, he saw a human crouched in the darkness, incapable of seeing him there as he saw the human. He heard the soft stealthy sounds of Sybelle and Antoine drawing near to the glass porch that ran along the back of the three townhouses. He heard the mortal intruder’s labored breath.

The intruder, dressed in black garments and black skull cap, dropped down into the wet grass. With deft feline movements he darted out from the shrubbery and into the dim yellow light from the house.

Scent of fear, scent of rage, scent of blood.

He saw Louis now, the lone figure on the bench beneath the tree, and he stiffened. Out of his slick black Windbreaker jacket he raised a knife that shone like silver in the semidarkness.

Slowly he came towards Louis. Ah, the old menacing dance.

Louis closed the book but he didn’t put it aside. The scent of the blood made him faintly delirious. He watched this emaciated yet powerful young man come closer. He saw the malignant face infinitely more clearly than the man, hardened with purpose, could see his.
The man was sweating and breathing raggedly, crazed with drugs and seeking for anything he might snatch to find the anodyne for his twisting gut. Such beautiful eyes. Such black eyes. Why these walls and not some other garden meant nothing in the scheme of things to this one, and before Louis could utter a word to him, the man had resolved to sink the knife into Louis’s heart.

“Death,” Louis said now loudly enough to stop the man, though he was only a few feet away. “Are you ready for this? Is this what you truly want?”

A sinister laugh came from the intruder. He stepped forward crunching the lilies, the stout white calla lilies, underfoot.

“Yeah, death, my friend!” the man said. “You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Ah, but for your sake”—Louis sighed—“would that were true. But it has never been less true than it is now.”

He had the man in his grip.

The knife was gone, lost in the wet leaves. Sybelle and Antoine waited in the shadows behind the wall of glass.

The man fought and kicked in a small useless fury. Oh, how Louis had always cherished the struggle, young muscles straining against him and the inevitable strangled curses like so much unwitting applause.

He drove his fangs right into the arterial stream. How ever translate for a mortal world the heat and purity of this simple feast? Salt and blood, and dark shiny brittle fantasies of victories, all flowing into him and out of the victim with the last protest of his dying heart.

It was finished. The man lay dead among the lilies. Louis stood wondrously satisfied and reanimated, the night opening up above him through luminous clouds. And the music inside the house began again.

Flushed with blood, flushed with the old deceptive but seductive sense of illimitable power, he thought of Lestat across the sea. What charms would his great castle hold, and what manner of court would convene there in chambers of stone that Louis so longed to see? He had to smile when he thought of the easy swagger with which Lestat had fulfilled the tribe’s collective dreams.

The road ahead could not be smooth, and simplicity could never be the goal. The burden of conscience was part of Louis’s human heart and the heart of every blood drinker he had ever known, even
Armand. And the struggle for goodness, actual goodness, would and must obsess them all. That was the miracle which now united the tribe.

How wondrous it seemed suddenly that such a struggle could now lay waste with such undeniable power the old dead dualities which had enslaved him for so long.

But he looked down at the man who lay dead at his feet, and a terrible sorrow took hold of him.

Death is the mother of beauty
.

It was a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens, and it came to him now with a painful irony. Beauty for me perhaps but not beauty for this one whom I have destroyed.

He knew terror for a moment, terror that might never really leave him no matter how much he came to understand, or to learn. Terror. Terror that this tender young mortal might have lost his soul to utter meaninglessness and annihilation, and that all of them, his blood drinker brothers and sisters, no matter how powerful, how old, how grand, might someday fall victim to the same brutal end.

After all, what ghost or spirit, no matter how eloquent or skilled, could claim that anything of sentience lay beyond the thick mysterious air surrounding this planet? Again he thought of Stevens’s poem.

His heart was breaking for the young man who lay there dead, eyes closed in the final sleep. The remains were already slowly perishing in the warm rain. His heart broke for all the victims everywhere of blood lust, and war, and accident, and old age, and illness, and unendurable pain.

But his heart broke a little for once for himself too.

And that perhaps was the real change in him, the change that he welcomed—that he could see himself as part now of all this great and glistening world. He was not part of some mindless force that sought to destroy it. No, he was part of
it
. He was part of this, this night with its sweet mild rain, and this whispering garden with its fragrant flowers and its trees, and the breezes that moved their branches. And he was part of the roar of the city rising around him, and part of the
sharp shining music that came from within the house. He was part of the grass beneath his feet, and the tiny relentless hordes of winged things that sought to devour the human waiting there helplessly for a proper grave.

He thought of Lestat again, confident, smiling, wearing the mantle of power as easily as he had always worn his finery, old and new.

He said under his breath:

“Beloved maker, beloved Prince, I will be with you soon.”

Tuesday

November 26, 2013

Palm Desert